I've written about the power of ClickFunnels for internet marketers but ClickFunnels is not limited to intangible products. Anyone who is selling products on Amazon, eBay, or any other 3rd party platform should get to know more about ClickFunnels.

Your business could very well depend on it (more on that later).

When it comes to selling physical products online via your own website, it seems that Shopify gets all the attention.

I appreciate Shopify but I am in love with ClickFunnels and the underlying concept of sales funnels over big, vague storefronts.

In this article I will to explain...

Why Amazon sellers should diversify from the marketplace.

All of the features that ClickFunnels has and how they compare to Amazon.

Why anyone can expand onto ClickFunnels EVEN IF they have no set niche or brand (currently selling whatever makes money).

Why building sites off of Amazon will help you grow your brand exponentially (**Hint: Build an email list!**)

Why tools like Orderlytics and Shipstation solve the fulfillment problem.

Let's get into it.

Oh! Before I get too far into why you should be expanding off of Amazon, let me explain one thing very clearly...

I am in no way suggesting that you stop selling on 3rd party platforms!

If you're takeaway from this post is, "Amazon isn't a good business model and I need to dump it ASAP," you need to re-read! That is in no way what I am trying to articulate here.

This article is about expanding your business and giving it more staying power. Selling on 3rd party marketplaces like Amazon and eBay is NOT mutually exclusive to using your own platform like ClickFunnels.

Ok, clear there?

Let's move on...

The Dark Side of Amazon

Now, I have written a lot of articles about Amazon and how great it is. I'm assuming that since you're reading this article, you are already sold on the benefits of Amazon and their FBA program (there are plenty!)

It isn't all sunshine and rainbows though when selling on Amazon.

Selling on Amazon has several shortcomings.

Here are the 6 big ones.

1. You have a lot of competition (literally on the same pages!)On Amazon, you are victim to "the race to the bottom," and it is a struggle to differentiate yourself and your product from your competitors.

2. You don't have your own customers. If you are suspended, your business is gone. You don't have an email list of past buyers to retarget and sell more product to.

3. You can easily be removed from the platform.​I have written at length about Amazon account suspensions (much of which comes from my own first hand experience) and the risks involved with selling on a "borrowed" platform.

4. You have to jump through too many hoops.​Amazon regularly restricts brands and categories. When you sell off of Amazon, you don't have to deal with this!

5. You don't have as much brand resale value. ​Although it might not be on your mind right now, it is always wise to plan your exit. If you simply sell, "whatever makes money," on Amazon right now, you don't have much in terms of a brand that can get big money on a marketplace like Flippa.com.

6. You are limited in your marketing. Amazon sellers are spoiled. Amazon brings the traffic to them (this is why I don't want you to quit!) That being said, if you are someone who likes to get your hands dirty and wants to do a little bit of actual marketing, Amazon isn't conducive to this. Your marketing wings are clipped in terms of retargeting, using media, creating up-sells, developing continuity programs for recurring revenue, adding testimonials and a litany of other powerful methods that would lead to more revenue. ClickFunnels fills these gaps.

WHY CLICKFUNNELS IS PERFECT FOR AMAZON SELLERS

So Amazon isn't perfect, but fortunately, owning your own platform can help "fill in the gaps," and allow you to make even more sales than you are now.

Here is what Clickfunnels can do for Amazon sellers and why selling with Clickfunnels is so different than just selling on Amazon directly.

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Get more sales and product reviews on Amazon!What? Isn't the point of ClickFunnels to help you get sales off of Amazon? The goal of ClickFunnels is to help you make more money. One of the ways we can use ClickFunnels to make more money is to send customers back to Amazon to use coupon codes and encourage them to leave a review. Reviews remain the #1 source of growth for new products on Amazon, but Amazon cracked down on reviews in October of 2016. There are several white hat methods we can use with ClickFunnels to help get more product reviews to your Amazon.com listings. There are plenty of black hat tactics as well but I will do my best to steer you clear of these as best as I can. So, even if the idea of selling products from your own site isn't attractive to you, ClickFunnels can still help you get more reviews and sales right to your existing Amazon products!

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Increase cart size with upsells and downsells. On Amazon, when someone buys a product from us, that is the end of the transaction. If they choose to purchase something else (and they often do) the sale goes to another seller. With Clickfunnels, we can create compelling "sales funnels" that sell customers additional, relevant products. This means more money for each visitor (which means we can spend more on traffic!) It gets pretty close to printing money once the process is refined. My Clickfunnels "one time offers" consistently convert at at least 30%! The logic is simple: we already have people who are ready, willing and able to buy our products, why would we not offer them more? By implementing some marketing tactics like scarcity and discounts, we can create gigantic average purchases. This simply isn't possible on Amazon.com. These giant purchases are going to a bunch of different sellers, not just you.

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Choose from multiple fulfillment options (including Amazon FBA!) You can use Amazon or a multitude of other options for fulfilling your orders from ClickFunnels.

Here is what the fulfillment workflow looks like if you were to use a tool called Orderlytics to fulfill your shipments.

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Easily embed on any WordPress site. Clickfunnels will host your sites for you but you can also integrate any sales funnel directly into an existing WordPress website with their included WordPress plugin. I love WordPress so the fact that it integrates so seamlessly with my funnels is a lifesaver. I can create funnels under the EntreResource.com domain name and they look totally natural​

Add scarcity with deadlines. Give customers a reason to buy sooner rather than later with limited time offers and deadlines. You will be amazed at how many of your sales will come within the 24 hours before a deadline. I consistently see about 50% of my sales on anything with a deadline in the last 24 hours!

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Integrate with dozens of 3rd party tools. Although Clickfunnels has a crazy amount of built in features and functions, they also integrate with a lot of 3rd party tools that make it possible to do nearly anything you can imagine related to e-commerce. One of my favorite integrations, Orderlytics, allows you to dropship from sites like Alibaba and Walmart!

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Earn recurring revenue with membership products and continuity plans. Yes, the magical "passive-income" all entrepreneurs crave is facilitated with Clickfunnels and their payment processor integrations with Stripe. What does this mean? Let's say that you sell a supplement and want to make sure that your customers don't forget to buy a fresh supply each month. You can offer buyers an upsell to a continuity program (for a small discount usually) that will charge them automatically each month and then ship the product to their doorstep without them needing to do anything! I am a member of a handful of these sorts of continuity programs. They work! Don't count on your past customers to remember to come back to your site each time they need another order. Odds are, they will just go to Amazon next time if you don't proactively lock them in.

The same recurring payment option used by companies like Athletic Greens can be emulated in Clickfunnels!

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Collect buyer information. Amazon buyers are just that... Amazon's buyers! If your goal is to create a legitimate, sustainable business that isn't dependent 100% on Amazon (or any other 3rd party platform) you need to build your contact list! I consistently generate $1/month/contact on my email lists.

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No limits on sales copy text. Amazon has limitations on how much text we can use and how it can look. Frankly, this sucks. Clickfunnels gives you the freedom to write as much or as little sales copy as you like to make the sale!

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Create follow up email sequences. You will be amazed at how many customers would have bought your product if you were able to just remind them about it later. With Clickfunnels email software Actionetics (included in the $297/month Etison suite) you can create email sequences that target your potential customers based on specific actions they have taken on your sales pages. I use a combination of Actionetics and ConvertKit (a 3rd party integration).

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Sell with webinars. Webinars crush. Yes, even for physical products. If you have a high end product you want to sell, webinars could be just what you need to turn leads into buyers.

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Pixel and retarget. Most Amazon sellers have no clue what paid traffic looks like (beyond Amazon's built in PPC tool). Pixel your traffic and remind them of your product in their news feeds on Facebook, Instagram and other platforms. Remember, most people need to see a product more than once before buying. Most marketers follow the "rule of 7," ideology that states most customers need to see a product at least 7 times before making any buying decisions! Amazon pixels your visitors but guess what, it's still a crapshoot if they actually buy from you or a competitor.

Split test pages. There are 3rd party paid softwares that allow you to create simple split tests on Amazon, but they are nothing like the split test features you will get with Clickfunnels.

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Use visual elements to make better looking pages. You control every aspect of your product pages. You can add audio, video, flashy graphics, pop ups and more. The difference between what can be done on your own platform and what can be done on Amazon is astronomical.

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Incorporate digital products. Just because you are selling physical products doesn't mean you can't sneak in some digital products into your sales funnels! Let's go back to my supplement example. You can sell a supplement and then up-sell an ebook related to fitness or wellness (whatever is most relevant to the physical product) and deliver it immediately to your buyers. If you are used to the high cost of goods for physical products, selling digital products will be a breath of fresh air!

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Access powerful metrics. Clickfunnels gives you a smorgasbord of data to browse through. Amazon is ok at this, but the data provided by Clickfunnels is extremely insightful and actionable. Data driven marketers absolutely love the metrics shown within Clickfunnels.

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Avoid pages of competitors. When you sell a product on Amazon, you are often splitting sales with competitors. Often other people are selling on the exact same listing! With Clickfunnels, you get every sale and every additional sale that comes after it as part of your funnel.

Using Clickfunnels to ﻿Take﻿ Your﻿ ﻿Brand off Amazon

Amazon is great but at the end of the day, you don't own the traffic. I have seen sellers lose their accounts overnight.

Even if you are comfortable with your place in the Amazon ecosphere, you can surely agree that diversifying to more marketplaces is smart on multiple levels.

Are You Ready to Expand off Amazon and Is Clickfunnels Right for You

Many Amazon sellers aren't prepared to expand off the platform.

To expand off the platform and onto Clickfunnels you should have...

Your own branded products OR an understanding of drop shipping (or willingness to learn).

A consistent "line" of items OR an understanding of drop shipping (or willingness to learn).​

The ability to handle your own customer support (this can also be outsourced very affordably).

Physical products that thrive on Clickfunnels include:

Products that customers might buy multiple units in one transaction. The beauty of Clickfunnels is the upsell and downsell. If you sell a product you can encourage the buyer to purchase more than one and receive a discount offer.

Products that compliment each other. If you have a product line you can easily sell complementary products.

Each of the scenarios above means you're going to increase the average cart size of each transaction.

Try doing that on Amazon! Your upsells are too often going to competitors.

Understanding the Sales Funnel Concept

The transaction that Amazon sellers are familiar with looks like this....

#1 Everyone in the world comes to Amazon (ok, a lot of people come to Amazon).

This is the real benefit of Amazon: their audience.

#2 They use Amazon as a search engine to find the product they want.

There are millions of items on Amazon. Whatever the customer is looking for is likely there or there is a very close alternative.

#3 The search comes back with potentially hundreds of possible items.

Each of the items has only a limited chance to separate itself from the competition. These include: price, image, headline, review count. Additional information is found only after a product is clicked and even then, the marketing fire power is lacking.

#4 The buyer browses the options.

​Amazon is extremely competitive. Simply putting the product in front of someone who wants it isn't enough. It has to be better than all the other options (or at least appear better enough to most people).​

#5 The buyer picks an item.

​The buyer now chooses the item and quantity. If they want more items, those sales will likely go to another seller.

#6 The transaction is complete.

This model works at scale but it leaves a lot to be desired. There is no reason why we can't create another medium of selling our most popular products.

Here is what selling the same items through a sales funnel would look like.

#1 Seller builds their own website and combines pages to create a sales funnel.

This is where most people give up. Step #1....

#2 Seller gets their own traffic.

Most of the sellers who navigated their way around creating a website give up here. Amazon did all the heavy lifting before, but now, we need to get our own traffic. Believe it or not, it's possible (more to come on that).

#3 Traffic is shown the product landing page.

This is the first step of the sales funnel. This page is what isolates buyers from the heard.

#4 Buyers ascend a value ladder.

Products are shown and the sale doesn't stop at just one product (although it can if you want to leave money on the table).

#5 Buyers information is saved for retargeting.

Your best future buyers are your past buyers. Anyone who purchase from you can be retargeted when you have more products to sell them or you want to get them to come back and purchase products they passed on originally.

OTHER PERKS OF SELLING WITH CLICKFUNNELS

There are so many limitations with Amazon that ClickFunnels solves.

1. Drop shipping is no longer frowned upon. When you sell with your own platform, you can drop ship from sites like Alibaba, Walmart etc. without worrying about account suspensions. Drop Shipping IS a sustainable business model, just not on Amazon.

2. No more gated brands and categories. Amazon doesn't allow the sale of a number of very profitable brands and categories. With your own platform, that isn't an issue.

I hope you consider taking your brand off of Amazon with ClickFunnels.

If you're ready to give it a try, I recommend you go with the $997 Funnel Hacker option. This will give you 6 months of the full ClickFunnels suite of tools normally priced at $297/month!

About the author

Nate McCallister

Nate is the founder and main contributor of EntreResource.com. He is a lifestyle entrepreneur who spends his time building businesses and raising his two kids Sawyer and Brooks with his beautiful wife Emily. His main interests include copywriting, economics and piano.